


made up my mind

by LAON



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, Headspace, Mutual Pining, Not Proofread, WHY is there no sensible tag for jo/anael??, a lil bit at least, also no ship name?? with ruby, are either of them clear on this fact? No, are you fuckers telling me you watched 15x13 and didn't immediately go "ah angry exes", is there gay yearning in this? Yes, it’s not exclusive and lacks functional communication but it’s still established sorta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:07:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28051398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LAON/pseuds/LAON
Summary: “Yeah, I heard. ‘Dean Winchester is saved’, right? It was all over the grapevine.” It had been so loud, so unmissable. Church bells tolling in a small town.“A warning would’ve been nice!”Or: Ruby needs help. Anael, in the deepest depths of her being, would give her anything.Takes place sometime in S4.
Relationships: Anael/Ruby, Sister Jo (Supernatural) | Anael/Ruby (Supernatural), Sister Jo/Ruby
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	made up my mind

**Author's Note:**

> listen you know who has gomens vibes? Jo and Ruby. angel and demon with an arrangement for mutual benefit? calling each other by pet names and not being sure what the other means by it? not really caring about the apocalypse one way or the other as long as they get to keep/achieve their own ends? ineffable (evil) wlw that’s who. that’s not what this fic is about but it IS proof in my book that this is the perfect mutual pining dynamic. also they’re angry exes, everyone got that from the show right?
> 
> title from "Papa Don't Preach" by Madonna.

Anael can feel her approach from a mile away, of course. She’s a businesswoman now, she knows how to stay on top of things. She has fine-tuned her senses to pick up on anything demonic long before it comes close enough to be a bother to her. 

(So maybe she’s slightly better attuned to Ruby than to other demons. So what? It’s just a result of practicing her senses on Ruby. It’s smart. 

Still.

It’s weird, how the sensation of the familiar mass of sharp, dark edges moving towards her isn’t frightening or uncomfortable despite the way it reeks of sulphur from a mile away.)

She gently and warmly shooed out the last straggling believers of the day five minutes ago, which sorta makes her wonder if Ruby knows exactly how good her timing is. (There is a good chance that she does.)

Still, Anael takes her time counting the earnings of the day, sorting the bills by size before she counts each stack and tucks them away one by one. Ruby’s presence grows closer quickly enough that she doesn’t have to worry about looking like she’s actually waiting by the time Ruby bursts through the doors to the hall she’s renting.

She does, of course. Dramatically so.

“Jo!” Ruby calls, sounding out of breath. Maybe she ran here? Or from her car, at least. The notion feels good. Warming. 

Anael kills the unintentional twitch of her lips and purposely puts on her most brilliant smile before she turns to greet Ruby.

“Hey, sweetheart. Long time no see,” Anael says, leaning against the table she’d been counting her bills at. She has a vague sense of deja vu, figures they should stop meeting like this. She’s made it all the way to Jefferson City since last time. She wonders how Ruby knew she was here.

“I’m not your sweetheart,” Ruby fires back automatically, “I need your help.”

She looks genuinely harried, Anael notes, which is a pretty neat trick. Mussed hair, like she’s been pulling it. Halfway out of breath. If Anael was bursting in somewhere to demand help, she’d also go for the desperate, stressed look, but she doesn’t know that she’d be able to pull it off quite like Ruby does. She can’t really bring herself to beg for help outright even when she’s grifting. She’s better at being in control, always.

“Whatever you need, but it’ll cost you.”

“There are angels on earth,” Ruby reports breathlessly. Anael feels like her insides freeze up all at once, feels the sense memory - straight-backed, stone-faced, undynamic, button-pushing, not-even-good-soldier-but-good-worker memory. Staying put in her proper place. Stiff.

She wiggles her fingers, her toes, moves through it. 

The earth is alive, is something she’s learned since she came here. Every second of every minute weighs more in the grand scheme of things than the vacuum of space, the glorious, never-ending peace of heaven. It’s alive, fluid. Dynamic in a way angels aren’t made to be. She wonders for the hundredth time if it’s possible for angels to grow souls. If being on earth long enough, acting human, being human, long enough will give her a soul. She thinks she knows the answer.

“You don’t say,” she tells Ruby flatly. Stone-face.

“Not you!” Ruby exclaims irritably, “other angels, okay? There are other angels on earth, and one of them pulled Sam Winchester’s brother from hell!”

Anael wonders who it was that managed such a feat. She never paid much attention to the garrisons, too caught up in her own button-pushing, but it doesn’t matter. She’d know them anyway, the way she knows all of the Heavenly Host, carved into her grace like a genetic footprint.

(She wonders about that sometimes, when entire families sit down at her services and she recognises the way they resemble each other. Eyes, noses, earlobes. Build, colouring. Once, she healed a mother and her two daughters, any of them reluctant to be saved without the other. She took an extra moment, that time, to study their genetic makeup before she finished healing them. They were so much more similar to each other than to the blind man before them or the cancerous girl after them. Both girls had their mother’s dark curls, but both had a predisposition for moving their Nasalis Muscle, flaring their nostrils, in a way their mother couldn’t. When she peeked into the mother’s mind, though, she saw a man whose nostrils flared when he laughed. She didn’t need to scour the mother’s mind anymore than that to understand. She could place a good bet on what his genetic code looked like anyway. They are made from each other, these humans. Connected on a personal level in a way the Host will never be, yet so separated in a way can never be either.)

“Yeah, I heard. ‘Dean Winchester is saved’, right? It was all over the grapevine.” It had been so loud, so unmissable. Church bells tolling in a small town.

“A warning would’ve been nice!”

Anael turns away, pretends to count her day’s earnings (again).

“Would you have wanted my warning? I didn’t know it would bother you that much.”

“I’m in the thick of it, Jo.”

“Yep,” Anael says. She glances over her shoulder, sweeps her gaze over Ruby’s general form again. There’s a hickey high up on her neck. From Sam Winchester, probably. “Wanna fuck later?”

“Sure, whatever. Are you gonna help me with this?”

“Do you need help with this?”

“There’s an angel on Dean Winchester’s shoulder!”

“And a demon on Sam’s. So?”

“So, Sam cares what his brother thinks. He could throw me to the wolves over this. Do you know what an angel could do to me?”

“Uh, yeah, sweetie. I do. Thought that was why you came to me?”

“Fuck off.”

“Sure, if you want. Could get you off first, though.”

“Whatever, I already said yes. You’re paying for dinner, though.”

“No way, you came here for my help. You can pay for dinner.”

* * *

“I was surprised at you earlier.”

Ruby hums, borrowing further into the pillow.

“The thing with my tongue? Yeah, Sam used that trick on me the other night. Awesome, right?”

Anael ignores the pang in her chest at that. She’s been in this vessel for too long, she thinks. It’s making her too human. She’s not human enough. She can’t fucking decide and it’s definitely Ruby’s fault, making her feel anything at all.

“It wasn’t that special, but no. I meant when you asked for help.”

Ruby freezes, turns on her shoulder to face the wall.

“So what.”

“So nothing, I guess. Business as usual, of course,” she can’t really help the sarcasm. It’s one of her favourite things about human communication. “You coming running to me without something to exchange for my services. No proposal.”

“I’ll give you a proposal, all right,” Ruby grumbles. That hurts, all right. Anael doesn’t let it deter her, though. She needs to know this, know why Ruby would come to her with problems that she doesn’t already know how to solve herself. Anael is usually just part of the solution. Part of the plan. A cog in the machine. 

Funny thing, that. Sometimes she thinks there is no being anywhere that can escape being part of a plan. The plan.

“Why would you give me leverage like that?” Anael insists.

“Who the fuck else was I gonna ask?”

“I don’t know, but why didn’t you bring something to bargain with at least? A peace offering, anything? You’re smarter than that. You’ve made this mistake before.” _When you were alive_ , is the bit that goes unsaid. She knows that Ruby knows. 

(She’d always been curious about demons before she met Ruby. Still is. Angels aren’t supposed to think or feel, and most of them pretend that they don’t, but Anael does, so she thinks the others must, too. They must be pretending not to, so if angels can think and lie, what do demons do? Do they regret the thing that sent them downstairs in the first place? Do they think about it at all? 

_(At least it was good for something_ , Ruby had said, the first time Anael watched her perform a spell. Witchery. What a thing to damn you. But it had answered her question, or begun to. Demons were human once. A demon is a corrupted soul. Angels have no soul to start with.))

Ruby is silent for a long time, long enough that Anael thinks she’s fallen into the sort of tenuous sleep she’s capable of. (It’s the kind of sleep that Anael watches enviously, covets like she covets Chanel and Louis Vuitton. She wants to be able to sleep like that, to let her body - it’s hers, she’s the one who carries it around all day, and Johanna was so fucking happy to give it over to her - and mind rest as if she really were human. You need a soul to sleep, though.). Instead of sleeping, Anael watches the dark top of Ruby’s head and the pale-smooth curve of her shoulder. Covets.

“I’m scared, okay?” Ruby says at long last, “I’m scared shitless about this. What I’m doing, consorting with the Winchesters. I’ve got all the forces of Heaven and Hell on my tail.”

Anael gives in to desire and presses her lips just above Ruby’s shoulder blade.

“You’ll be in the clear once it’s over.”

“It’s not over yet.”

“I mean, yeah. You really are in the thick of it. Your choice, though.”

Ruby snorts.

“Way to make me feel better.”

“Not trying to,” Anael says. She presses another kiss to the same spot, then another one, higher. “If you ever wanna get out, though. I know someone who’s pretty good at staying off the radar.”

Ruby shifts slightly before she turns over to face Anael again. Anael lets it dislodge her, scoots back just far enough that she can see Ruby’s face in detail without it going blurry when she turns. 

She’s always found it odd, the way Johanna’s eyes work. She was near-sighted before, but Anael fixed that when she took up residence. The odd thing is that for all the grace Anael is pumping around, her eyes still work like human eyes. Too blurry when she gets too close, limited by the curve of the horizon. No endless sight. There are fewer colours, but the ones that are there are sharper, more clearly contrasted. She’s sure that Ruby’s hair would contain multitudes of colour if she wasn’t seeing it through human eyes, but she likes it better like this. Likes how it’s just a dark mass, the same way Ruby is in her peripheral senses. Sharp against the surrounding pale beige.

Ruby lets her push her fingers into that hair, lets her tuck it away behind her. She just watches with great dark eyes. Anael will never understand why her siblings can’t see the sheer beauty of the human form.

“You sure this friend of yours could keep us completely off the radar?”

“Completely. She’s the best out there. Lots of experience.”

“Pride is a sin, Jo.”

“Yeah, no shit. Was never really my problem, though.”

“What was?”

Anael takes a long moment to drink Ruby in, the way her edges soften between the sheets. In the dark.

“Greed,” she says at last, steady in this one thing she knows about herself.

Ruby watches her back for another long moment before she reaches up to thumb the corner of Anael’s mouth, the edge of her lips. She huffs.

“Yeah, me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> this is so far from my best work but?? i CANNOT have been the only one who immediately thought of this when watching 15x13. if you didn't you're LYING


End file.
